With iOS app, SlideShare a more valuable social sharing tool for law firms

As The Next Web’s Josh Ong reported on Thursday, LinkedIn has released an iOS app for SlideShare, a first for LinkedIn’s presentation service.

SlideShare is slide hosting service where users can upload files privately or publicly as PowerPoint, PDF, or Keynote presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself or embedded on other sites.

SlideShare’s goal is to share knowledge online. It’s the world’s largest community for sharing presentations averaging 60 million unique visitors and 215 million page views a month.

This is the first mobile app for SlideShare and makes all the sense in the world with 40% of LinkedIn’s traffic coming from mobile. You will be able to create personalized feeds of decks shared and liked by people in your network. You will also see picks from categories and SlideShare’s own editors.

SlideShare is way underutilized by lawyers — and me. I find people looking at my decks from years ago that I shared on SlideShare.

Sure, share decks from presentations. But SlideShare could be more valuable.

Imagine doing a deck to teach or explain a legal issue to others. Perhaps keeping it simple with a few words or a phrase on each slide so that the deck can be reviewed quickly. On the last slide leave information about you. What you do, where they can learn more (your blog and other decks) and how they can get a hold of you. All with your law firm brand tastefully displayed.

It’s these type of value offerings that one in-house counsel told me she can use – she uses decks that lawyers send her to teach employees in her company. Email- newsletters, something every firm uses, she tosses and marks as spam.

Mobile is going to make your contributions on SlideShare more and more valuable – to you and viewers. LinkedIn expects 50% of its traffic to soon come from mobile. Mobile users share on social much more often than those on non-mobile devices.

You can expect SlideShare presentations to be shared on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. SlideShare presentations are already being liberally embedded in blog posts. Are you embedding presentations on your blog?

SlideShare is a real, but yet underutilized opportunity, for law firms to share their passion, insight, and experience.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Praveen